NASA selected SpaceX to launch a planned voyage to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, reports Phys.org. The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is worth $178 million. The mission was previously supposed to take off on NASA's own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. Critics have called the SLS a...
Weather is a tricky science, particularly at very high altitudes, with the mix of plasma and neutral particles. In sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) – large meteorological disturbances related to the polar vortex in which the polar stratosphere temperature increases as it is affected by the winds around the pole – the polar vortex is weakened. SSWs also have profound atmospheric effects at great distances, causing changes in the hemisphere opposite from the location of...
An attempt at purifying New Delhi's notoriously polluted air will see 40 giant fans push out filtered air in the heart of the Indian capital's posh downtown shopping district, reports Tech Xplore. But the $2-million "smog tower" has no shortage of doubters. The 25-metre-high tower is meant to filter air over a one-square-kilometer radius around the swanky shops and cafes in Connaught Place. "Smog is an annual phenomenon because of particulate matter. So we are (trying)...
Many popular websites fell offline today in a widespread outage of service, reports the BBC. Visitors attempting to reach some sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites. Affected services included Airbnb, UPS, HSBC bank, British Airways, and the PlayStation network used for online games. Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector reported thousands of problems from its users across dozens of platforms. As some websites began to appear again for users in Europe and the...
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have designed a new class of molten sodium batteries for grid-scale energy storage, Tech Xplore reports. Molten sodium batteries have been used for many years to store energy from renewable sources, such as solar panels and wind turbines. However, commercially available molten sodium batteries, called sodium-sulfur batteries, typically operate at 520-660 degrees Fahrenheit. Sandia's new molten sodium-iodide battery operates at a much cooler 230 degrees Fahrenheit instead. "We've been working to bring the...
Under the picturesque dawn sky of the West Texas desert, Jeff Bezos, the 57-year-old ex-Amazon CEO and founder of space tourism company Blue Origin, rocketed into space for a brief moment, calling it, "the first step of something big," CNET reports. It happened 52 years to the day since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pressed their boot prints into the moon. Atop the Blue Origin rocket, locked inside a gumdrop-shaped capsule, Bezos, his brother Mark, aeronautics...
Headlines across the world tell us that hundreds of people have died after the recent heat waves in Canada and the northwestern U.S. The stories invariably blame climate change and admonish us to tackle it urgently. What they mostly reveal, however, is how one-sided, alarmist reporting leaves us badly informed, writes Bjorn Lomborg in the Financial Post. The stories are based on a kernel of truth. Global warming is a real problem, and rising temperatures...
Videoconferencing firm Zoom, whose growth was supercharged by the pandemic over the past year, will buy the cloud call centre company Five9 in an all-stock deal valued at about $14.7 billion, reports Tech Xplore. That is far greater than Zoom's market valuation a little over two years ago when it went public for slightly more than $9 billion. Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan said in a blog post Sunday that the acquisition will accelerate the...
Lymph nodes are critical to the body's immune response against tumors but, paradoxically, cancer cells that spread, or metastasize, to lymph nodes often avoid being eliminated by immune cells. Recent experiments by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston University School of Medicine provide insights on the details behind this immune evasion, which could help scientists develop strategies to overcome it, reports Medical Xpress. "We know that lymph nodes are often the first place cancer spreads as it...
Tech Xplore reports that activists, journalists, and politicians around the world have been spied on using cellphone malware developed by a private Israeli firm, igniting fears of widespread privacy and rights abuses. The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel's NSO group, was reported on by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde, and other news outlets who collaborated on an investigation into a data leak. The leak was of a list of...
